A Strand Of Three Chords

A Dare & A Prayer by Julie Lessman is a very powerful Christian historical novel and part of The Cousins O’Connor series. It can be read as a stand-alone.

The action begins in 1944 in the Pacific on an American airbase. We go through to the end of the war, and then move stateside for the second half of the novel.

Julie Lessman has produced a tale with some very hard-hitting shocking themes as we see the awful topic of child trafficking and prostitution that has been going on in Japan since the Middle Ages. This shocks the characters and the reader as we see innocence defiled while local people stand by, doing nothing as they are fearful of reprisals. We witness the anger in characters who refuse to stand by and do nothing.

There is the theme of the prodigal son. We follow a character who seems hell bent on self-destruct, as he follows the pleasures of this world. People tell him about God. His family prays for him. He follows his own path until one day the scales fall off. “God was real… He actually cared about every one of His children.”

Sometimes we can fix things for ourselves and sometimes we can’t. It is always good to pray without ceasing about everything. Sometimes the only thing we can do is to pray. “Never had he been nor ever expected to be a praying man. But he planned to pray now.” When we pray, we tap into a power beyond ourselves. God longs to answer our prayers. He always answers in His way, at just the right time. He never shows up early and He is never late.

We were never meant to keep our faith to ourselves. We need to show Jesus to a hurting world in need of a Savior. “Putting feet to her faith.”